Discussion on separate console/PC leaderboards for Buckyball race events.

[Raiko]

So I played a little more on Xbox last night - not much I was dead tired!

It turns out that I was wrong and keyboards can only be used for comms, not for key-binds. I think I've figured out how to get everything I'd like for racing, mining & bounty hunting bound to a gamepad, but it's definitely lacking in axes compared to a HOTAS or dual-stick setup.

If I was primarily a console player, I'd definitely want to get the HOTAS-X/One/4 - as it is though I've already got the T16000 & TWC(?) hotas, which isn't console compatible so I'll have to make do with a gamepad.

 

[Whirlwind113]

I don't plan to go as far as an actual separate leaderboard as I think it's important for our very niche corner of the ED community to be a single group

I'm fine with that as long as there will be the platform specific column.

Our races rarely have prizes and most of the fun really is competing against your own best time and the players who you actually meet in-game.

Speaking of prizes: I can see few options here.
1. Give away prizes to first 3 CMDRs regardless their platform, as it is now.
2. Give away prizes to 1st CMDR on each platform (PC, PS4 and XBox) which could encourage player from different platforms to join the party. And if there are no participants on the specific platform you can just give away this prize to a random CMDR.
3. Give away all prizes to 3 random CMDRs who took part in the event regardless their position/platform in leaderboard, just like Op. IDA does in their give aways.

Even if just 3 or 4 of you joined in with Ultravi, you'd have tremendous fun competing against each other.

I'd love to go on actual race with multiple CMDRs, not just a time trial against someone's best time. But knowing how "good" Elite network code is, especially on consoles, it'll turn out into a terrible laggy slideshow.

 

[Raiko]

Those are some ideas regarding prizes @Whirlwind113 - although we really do just race for fun usually. And I love Operation Ida.

I'm definitely including a platform column in every race that I personally run from now on. And the IronBucky Challenge already has the platform question added to the submission forms, so the leaderboards will get that column added next time I update (tomorrow hopefully).

One of the reasons that we encourage playing in open during our races is that we get to meet up with other Cmdrs during the race. So we have had a few spontaneous live heads-to-heads, as well as couple of organised live runs (those are usually on the first or last day of the event). Obviously for consoles it's going to need more participation before anyone is racing against each other live.

Our Buckyball races are always going to be time-trails - rather than live races - as it's the only way to have events open to all players, regardless of platform, location and mode. We're definitely up for some more live races at the beginning or end of our events though.

 

[Alec Turner]

Following on from these discussions (which have been really useful) I'm now going to make it a matter of policy that we include a platform column in future Buckyball race scoreboards.

I've also updated the scoreboard for the Pomeche Ridge Challenge so it now shows the "Platform" column (information I've been casually gathering since the start). There's a few blanks in there which I'll try to get filled in retrospectively and going forward I'm going to switch to using a Google form for submissions so that the platform can be a required piece of information.

There's one main takeaway from the above scoreboard for me ...

 

[Raiko]

Maybe I can be the first Xbox player to attempt the Pomeche Ridge Challenge.

I'm going to do the same thing with the IronBucky Challenge leaderboards.

I'll be leaving the A* Challenge boards exactly as they are, mainly because Xbox, PS4 and VR runs have always been singled out in the notes column.